A Brother's Price

innocent. He took too much pleasure in hurting her and her sisters. Keifer’s and Eldest Porter’s deaths must have been an accident—perhaps Keifer misunderstood the Porters’ instructions and wasn’t supposed to go himself. Certainly the Porters never tried to explain why Eldest Porter had arrived so late, or used the back entrance. Had she been rushing to save Keifer, who wasn’t where they planned him to be?
    If Keifer hadn’t died in the theater, who would have been next on the Porters’ list? Her mothers and all the adult princesses, leaving the Porters regent to the youngest? The entire family?
    Yes. the entire family. Sisters-in-law inherit an orphaned estate. They were an ancient and powerful family, lacking only a royal marriage, thus Jerin’s kidnapping.
    If the Porters planned to marry Jerin, then there was hope. They would keep him alive, and hopefully clean. Logic suggested that they would take him to the Destiny , and from there, upriver to above Hera’s Step to the ducal seat, Avonar. She needed only to catch up with them before they could force the marriage.
    And then she had vengeance to wreak.
     
    Jerin woke to female voices arguing. For a moment of complete disorientation, he thought he was home with his sisters squabbling as usual. Then he remembered the attack at the palace, the desperate struggle to leave a warning for Ren as they dragged him from his rooms, the entry door booming like a great drum as the guard tried to force their way in. His attackers had been hampered by the fact that they wanted him unharmed—if they had wanted him dead, he would have never been able to fight free long enough to write his message on the wall.
    At one point, though, one of them had whined. “Give it to him, already!” and a needle had jabbed into him like a wasp’s sting. Everything went weird and dreamy after that. A race down a dark tunnel. The garden from an upside-down perspective. A wagon ride with wheels rumbling like unending thunder. It seemed as if the true him had been shrunk down, caught like a butterfly in a glass jar. and was riding in the large shell of his body. That tiny him, unable to act. watched with helpless alarm as they slipped out of the city and took to the Queens highway before sleep finally spared him the agony of witnessing his own abduction.
    “Just tell us straight—how did ya know it was us that nabbed the royal mount?” a woman was saying as he woke up.
    “I guessed,” a second woman answered in a cultured alto that seemed familiar, as if Jerin had talked to her before. “Anyone with two ears and two eyes could see that the Hats tapped you for something big, and then this turns up.”
    There was a rustle of newspaper.
    “Ya know we can’t read, Miss High-and-mighty.” a third female speaker growled.
    “Well, Bert, if you could read anything but Hat cant, you’d see that you now have what the entire Queensland is looking for.” Miss High-and-mighty stated in her strangely familiar voice. “The Hats told you to take him. Fen? Or you just figured to do a little husband raiding while you were in the palace?”
    “We did exactly what we were supposed ta do. Take the boy.” Fen proved to be the first speaker. “Iffen ya want ta know more, ya can ask the Hats when they come for him.”
    “What do they want with him?”
    A short nasty laugh, and a fourth woman said, “I expect what any healthy woman would want with a man that pretty.”
    In the general laughter that followed, Jerin picked out at least seven separate female voices. Seven strangers! Oh, merciful gods, he was lost. He wished he could sink back into oblivion, but now that he was awake, his body was making demands on him. He needed to pee and his stomach was queasy, like he’d eaten too many sweets.
    He blinked open his eyes. They were in a shack, large enough for two good-sized rooms with a door between them, but river-trash poor in quality. The walls lacked plaster and whitewash, and were made of roughhewn lumber nailed to framing timbers. Sod covered the roof, pale fingers of grass roots prying at the cracks between the overhead boards. One paneless window, its outside shutters latched tight, a shipping crate standing in as bedside table, a lit oil lamp, and the bed he lay on made up the furnishings of the room he was in. The voices spilled through the open door from the next room; shadows cast by a second lamp moved menacingly across the rough walls. A girl, filthy-faced and feral-eyed,